10 Artists Who Use Video Games as Their Medium

You wouldn’t think that you could make video games about meditation, but that’s exactly what Ian Bogost did in A Slow Year (above), his collection of four games, one for each season, in which the goal is to observe instead of gain stars or murder zombies. Bogost even calls them “game poems.” His previous games has similarly counterintuitive approaches: Guru Meditation, for iPhone and Atari, rewards the user who can keep still the longest, and Cow Clicker, for Facebook, essentially makes fun of the idea of a Facebook games. (As Bogost explains on his site: “You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks… You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories.”)

[…] We’ll be talking about the question of videogames as art later in the semester, but for now I wanted to point your way toward a recent overview of 10 artists who use videogames as their medium. […]